SAN FRANCISCO is justifiably famous for the variety and the excellence of its restaurants. But as a visitor, particularly one looking for both a great meal and a good deal, it's hard to avoid the feeling that you've somehow not quite found what you're looking for. The tourist traps near Fisherman's Wharf and most of the dizzying array of restaurants in visitor-heavy areas like North Beach rely on a stream of out-of-towners, most of whom will never come again. Instead, head for San Francisco's eclectic neighborhoods, where restaurants have to compete for repeat customers in one of the country's most restaurant-savvy cities.

The four restaurants below will provide you with inventive and satisfying meals, all for under $25 a person, drinks included. Each of these is good enough to anchor an afternoon or evening's explorations of its neighborhood.

When San Franciscans indulge in a bit of restaurant trendiness, it's usually with good reason. Delfina, an haute-Tuscan outpost in the Mission District that has been mobbed ever since it opened in 1998, is out of our price range. Which is why the owners, Anne and Craig Stoll (who was a James Beard Award nominee last year), opened Pizzeria Delfina next door in the summer of 2005.

Pizzeria Delfina's cheerful and bright, if cozy, interior spills out on warm nights to a bustling sidewalk scene, where you can sample small, carefully crafted Neapolitan-inspired pizzas featuring a crisp, hair-thin base surrounded by thick, chewy crust. Toppings are sublimely fresh and carefully composed in a limited number of idealized combinations. The margherita ($11) could not be better, with a sauce redolent of tomatoes just off the vine, and soft wads of mozzarella. More complicated pies, like clam ($16) and broccoli rabe ($12.75), fit diverse ingredients tightly. Sharp, bitter salads like the tricolore ($8) or tuna conserva ($9) make perfect complements to the pizza. Both are bright and cleanly scented with olive oil. A glass of wine like the 2005 nero d'Avola Adesso ($5.25; $20 for a bottle) rounds out a meal still light enough to allow for a Bellwether ricotta cannoli ($4.25), which on its own is worth a visit: this firecracker of crisp, cinnamony pastry bursts with a fluffy, lemony interior studded with roasted pistachios. Pair it with a glass of Castellare vin santo ($5.50), and you'll see what it takes to make a restaurant trendy in San Francisco.

But unless you get there early, you'll experience the downside of trendy, too: after 7 any night of the week waits can reach an hour and a half.

3611 18th Street (at Guerrero), (415) 437-6800; www.pizzeriadelfina.com. Reservations not taken.

Read the full article here.

With restaurants, as with empires, expansion is frequently a prelude to decline.  But Craig Stoll of Delfina avoided this when he annexed the tiny space next door.

Pizzeria Delfina is a modest addition to a Mission district restaurant whose strength has always been simplicity.  Stoll’s new place sticks to the formula.  It doesn’t try to do too much (pizzas, salads, calzone), but what it does, it does very well.

Whereas Delfina has a full-fledged trattoria menu, from salmon salad to Tuscan ribs, its sidekick is for those in search of a casual meal.  In Anthony Strong, Stoll found the perfect man to delegate the dough making to.  His thin, crisp pizzas, mottled black on the bottom from their brief time in the oven, are as delicately dressed as anything this side of Victoria’s Secret.  The best of them might be the Napoletana, topped with capers, olives, and anchovies but no cheese.  How nice to eat a slice that doesn’t sag under its cargo when you lift it to your mouth. 

Salads are similarly understated:  eggplant caponata, roasted beets with ricotta salata.  Choices are scrawled on a big blackboard, an invitation to grab a piece of chalk and write, “I will never order pineapple on pizza again.”

Like Delfina, the pizzeria is something of a destination restaurant.  But it has the good sense not to act like one. And that might be what’s best about it.  Even as its reputation reaches across the city, it still feels deeply rooted in the neighborhood.

I love pizza. It's my desert island dish, my last meal, my favorite snack. I will detour hours out of my way or volunteer for an unnecessary business trip to try a famous pie. When visiting hot spots like New York City, Chicago, or Rome, I'll happily eat it every day if my companions don't interfere.

So I'm happy as a Pepe's white clam pie at the big increase in quality and variety of pizza hereabouts recently. In the past two years, Christophe Hille brought us world-class Neapolitan-style pies at A16, Brian Sadigursky raised the bar for Chicago deep-dish at Little Star, and Charlie Hallowell built a whole cuisine around his wood-fired pizza oven at Oakland's Pizzaiolo.

Craig and Anne Stoll joined the trend last July by opening Pizzeria Delfina next door to their longtime Mission District destination, Delfina. The place is a self-conscious, upscale take on a classic hole-in-the-wall pizza joint: no-frills décor, mostly stainless steel and white tile, brightly lit, looking more hygienic than hip. Douglas Burnham, the designer, made clever use of the tiny space, arranging the kitchen so that the friendly, efficient staffers can go about their business easily even when the place is packed. Still, seating's quite limited -- 24 seats, including six small tables for two or three and eight stools at the counter (with great views of the oven action). Weather and space heaters allowing, sidewalk tables can hold another eight diners. The restaurant is popular and takes no reservations, so expect a wait.

The menu's as small as the dining room: 10 antipasti, six pizzas, and three desserts on the printed menu, with daily specials -- one antipasto, two pizzas, one hot entree, and one dessert -- written in by hand. As at the mother ship (or, for that matter, in the motherland), the kitchen focuses on maximizing the flavor of top-quality local ingredients through simple combinations and straightforward preparations.

In the sad event you aren't in the mood for pizza, you could make a great meal of just appetizers. On my first visit, we started with warm marinated olives, a mix of black and green, pure and fruity, like good olive oil. Felino salame from the venerable and formerly stodgy local Columbus Salame Co. was a big surprise, like Nonna getting her tongue pierced. The Felino holds its own against top local charcuterie producers such as A16, Paul Bertolli, and the Fatted Calf (and, not surprisingly, costs a whopping $22 a pound retail). A warm salad of cauliflower sauced with capers, garlic, and chilies and another of marinated beets tossed with grated ricotta salata were perfect for a cold winter night. The fresh-stretched mozzarella (made nightly from fresh curd), drizzled with good olive oil and served, like several other dishes, with warm olive oil crostini, was tasty, but not in the same class with the Gioia burrata served at A16 and elsewhere -- though it'd be great in the summer, paired with ripe tomatoes.

Next visit, at the server's enthusiastic recommendation, we began with romaine lettuce with green goddess dressing. Good tip; the toasted hazelnuts and fresh tarragon in this salad were remarkable, highlighting the effort the restaurant puts into sourcing the best ingredients. To my taste, the otherwise scrumptious salad of tuna confit (aka conserva), white kidney beans, and radicchio had too much lemon zest, but my companions strongly disagreed. We didn't polish off a generous plate of tangy wedges of pecorino pepato cheese with slices of crisp, sweet Pink Lady apples until dessert, in which context it made more sense.

On to the main event: The pizza's billed as "Neapolitan-inspired," and that influence is clear. Like pizza in Naples, it's thin compared with the typical American version, though not so thin as in Rome. The 12-inch pies are small enough that a hungry pizza lover can easily polish one off alone. The sauce (used on only half the pizzas) is pure tomato -- simple and sweet. The amount of sauce, cheese, and other toppings is restrained, so the crust doesn't get soggy.

And, ah, that crust. Naples' influence ends here: You can't make a true pizza napoletana without a wood-burning oven like A16's. What Pizzeria Delfina has instead is the best crust I've seen come out of a gas deck oven: crunchy, chewy, good wheaty flavor, just the right amount of salt, cooked to a golden brown with a few specks of darker brown and black. I don't know what to call this style -- it's not as tender as Neapolitan or as thin and crisp as Roman -- but taken on its own terms, the crust is perfect. Delfina also departs from Naples on toppings, using a variety of stronger-flavored cheeses rather than just fresh mozzarella.

The first pie I tried was a knockout. The amatriciana special, named after a Roman pasta recipe, was topped with tomato sauce, guanciale (unsmoked hog-jowl bacon), caramelized onions, and pecorino cheese. The careful balance of funky aged pork, fruity tomato, sharp cheese, and slightly smoky onions put me in pizza heaven. That day's other special, a bianca (no tomato sauce) with hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, was subtler but still delicious. Its fresh thyme and mix of rich, mild Taleggio and Fontal cheeses brought out the umami in the buttery, earthy, slightly nutty mushrooms. That night's third pizza -- a bianca of broccoli rabe with ricotta, oven-dried tomatoes, and mozzarella -- I'd have liked better had the greens been blanched less, so as to retain more of their bitterness.

Second time around I tried some simpler pies. A classic New York combination (chunks of house-made fennel sausage with onions, peppers, and mozzarella) reminded me of my favorite pie at John's of Bleeker Street, only better. The margherita, just tomato, mozzarella, a few basil leaves, and a pinch of Parmesan, let me appreciate the excellence of the sauce, but next time I'd add the optional pepperoni.

The formula is familiar:  seasonal ingredients spared tortured preparation, with the results delivered in a fashion that would make your nonna proud.  Eight pizzas appear on the menu, their blistered crusts allowed to breathe under lightly applied toppings such as cherrystone clams with oregano and hot pepper and housemade fennel sausage with peppers and onions.  A broccoli rabe calzone comes stuffed with Ricotta, and a pizza Napoletana, with anchovies, capers, and olives but mercifully free of cheese, packs more flavor than a dozen ordinary pies combined.  Antipasti also get easygoing treatment, from marinated beets with Ricotta salata to a tangy eggplant caponata.  A compact wine list is crammed with reasonably priced Italian reds, and the waitstaff works with the same deft touch as the kitchen.  Hollywood could learn a lesson from this spin-off: keep it small, simple, and worth the cost.  3611 18th Street (Bet. Guerrero and  Dolores Sts.) 415-437-6800 

IN ADDRESSING THE pizza situation – the dearth of decent New York-style, the promising signs in the Chicago deep-dish area – I have given short shrift to the many respectable chefs in North Beach who produce traditional Italian-type pizzas on a nightly basis. I mean no disrespect to these artisans, but in my experience there is little to choose from among such pizzas. The ingredients are fine, the crusts tossed with reasonable skill, the toppings a matter of preference or theology.

But now Delfina has gotten into the pizza game, a development I imagine inspires those established pizza makers to quail the way tech startups do when Microsoft comes after them.

If you're reading a food column, you probably already know about Delfina, the Italian new-wave place on 18th Street distinguished from other such places by its total excellence. Several years ago, I had a roast chicken there that has become the standard by which I will forever judge poultry: It tasted as though someone with a master's degree in basting had devoted a full 24 hours to repeatedly basting it with a fine-pointed sable brush. I never went there again, although Delfina is around the corner from my house. This was partly because I didn't want to spoil the memory of that chicken, which has taken on such mythical stature in my consciousness that any comparison with reality, no matter how delicious, runs the risk of shattering my faith and damaging my childlike sense of wonder. But it was largely because Delfina is, y'know, spendy – not on the only-for-rich-people-on-their-anniversary level, but definitely in the wait-until-your-parents-are-in-town-assuming-your-parents-have-more-money-than-you-do category. (The Bay Guardian listings rate it at two dollar signs, but cross-referencing those listings' own stated criteria with Delfina's menu suggests that a rating of three dollar signs would be more appropriate.)

A year ago, this newspaper reported that Delfina owners Craig and Anne Stoll were taking over the storefront next to their building, turning a musty and slightly frightening junk shop into a pizzeria. The author of that article regarded this development with ambivalence, as though the replacement of a bunch of rusting kitchenware by gourmet thin-crust, Italian-style pizza had a downside. While you will now have to go elsewhere for out-of-date computer manuals and scratchy vinyl copies of Fiddler on the Roof: The Original Cast Recording, you can get some Delfina-quality cooking for ten bucks and an hour's wait.

Chicago pizza is thick; New York pizza is thin; Italian-style pizza yearns asymptotically toward the two-dimensional. The physical challenge this presents to the pizza chef is obvious – a step too far, and your crust has holes in it. But that's a conceptually trivial problem; it requires only mastery of existing technique, not new thinking. The philosophical challenge is getting that kind of extreme thinness while maintaining flavor. Most Italian pizza passes over the palate as a ghost or a rumor: the sound of the teeth breaking through the crispy crust, the slippery sensation of hot melted cheese, and it's gone. Craig Stoll (or some genius pizza specialist who's subcontracting for him) has solved this problem. The pizza is as thin as anything made up of three vertically stacked layers can be: When it's hot you basically pour the tip of each slice into your mouth like a liquid. But it warps time and space, like the chewing gum in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The thinnest sliver of Delfina's pizza is as powerfully and elegantly flavorsome as a full deep-dish pie.

I am not a purist by nature, but I do stand foursquare against the tendency of this absurd culture to think adding more flavors necessarily improves a food item. In the two weeks since Pizzeria Delfina opened, I've tried almost all the varieties on offer (eschewing only the obscenely named Clam Pie), and I'd recommend that you get the margherita: just tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a little basil and parmesan.

The mozzarella cheese is described in the menu as "fresh-stretched," a phrase I had to look up on the Internet. (More than half the hits refer to Delfina, which suggests that the Stolls made the term up.) Every day, Delfinians pour hot water over mozzarella curds and stretch them into cheese; the result has a purity of character usually found only in young children and trusty dogs. The crust is crisp and unsalty in that self-effacing way of Italian bread products.

But the sauce – the sauce is complicated. I will not attempt to reverse-engineer the sauce by pointing to a hint of whatever or a pinch of the other thing; that would be like trying to describe The Marriage of Figaro by observing that there's an F-sharp in there somewhere. The flavors are so perfectly balanced and integrated that it's hard to believe the recipe was invented; it seems more likely that it came into being over millions of years, like the Grand Canyon or the human brain.

There are other varieties of pizza beyond the margherita, and some are pretty good, but each in some crucial way distracts from what's really important, which is the combination of the cheese and the sauce on the soft, slippery crust. The worst offender, and the only pizza that I think is really misconceived, is the Napolitana, which with capers, olives, and anchovies is essentially a saltfest unmeliorated by cheese. There's the quattro formaggi, whose blend of cheeses might want to be fine-tuned a little; the sharper ones overwhelm the creamier ones. The broccoli rabe calzone is an enjoyable pouch of melty ricotta and mozzarella, but it's also a missed opportunity to eat that tomato sauce and, as such, a small tragedy.

On the other hand, the pepperoni, available as an extra topping on any pizza, is a champ. The slices are a mere half-inch in diameter, in the Italian style, but they curl up into little saucers, each containing a few drops of orange grease in the American style. The taste is dark and salty and smoky and sophisticated, without the broad hamminess that would overwhelm the pizza.

There are a bunch of things to complain about: The pizzas are smaller than I'd like, and the crusts extend too far toward the pizza's center, which means that some of the slices consist of a tiny little triangle of sauce and cheese attached to a big handful of bread, and the amount of table space is absurdly small, but if you get one of the sidewalk tables or order the pizzas to go, they've cooled off that crucial few degrees by the time you get to them, and even though it wouldn't be appropriately Italianate, they should sell big slices to walk-in customers for a few bucks. But it would be churlish, confronted with perfection, to complain too loudly.